Russ Vernon-Jones

love, justice, and climate change … I know you can make a difference.

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Carrots and Sticks

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There has been some discussion of carrots and sticks in our nation’s climate policy. Why? What’s at stake here and why does it matter?

The metaphor apparently goes back more than a century to a cartoon that portrayed a race between two donkey riders– one encouraging his steed forward by dangling a carrot in front of it, while the other whipped his animal on the flank with a stick. It general it refers to motivating human behavior by providing incentives and rewards (carrots), or by threats, punishment, or other negative consequences (sticks). A “carrot and stick” approach generally refers to applying both at the same time.

What does this have to do with climate policy? It’s relevant, for instance, if a state wants to get its electric utility companies to provide more electricity from clean, renewable sources and less generated by burning fossil fuels. The state might provide tax rebates, subsidies, or other financial incentives (carrots) for providing more clean energy, or it might impose a tax on fossil fuel use or pass laws requiring utilities to provide an increasing percentage of green electricity each year (sticks).

This is a key issue in how the federal government in the U.S. is trying to deal with the climate crisis. The original Build Back Better climate bill that the Biden Administration proposed in 2021 had a healthy mix of carrots and sticks.

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Extreme Heat, Possibilities, and a Recent Action

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At the beginning of April, I wrote about record-breaking heat in Rio de Janeiro and in Africa. This week the news is about an intense heat wave in south and east Asia. The temperature in Bangkok, Thailand was over 104°F. Bangladesh has had 23 “heat-wave days” in April, with temperatures surpassing 108°F (42°C0 in some areas. The heat forced schools for 33 million children to close. Schools in India and the Philippines have also been closed because of extreme heat. In Myanmar the temperature reached 113°F.

I find these temperatures mind-boggling. It’s hard to imagine people carrying on their lives.

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Solving Humanity’s Shared Climate Crisis

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A great many of us care about the climate crisis. Many of us have taken steps to reduce our carbon footprints. Many of us have advocated for good climate policy at the local, state, and national levels. We have voted for candidates who seemed most likely to promote effective climate action. Collectively we’ve made quite a difference. Public opinion polls now show almost three-quarters of U.S. adults want more government action on climate. U.S. emissions are slowly coming down, not fast enough, but coming down.

Emissions from the wealthiest nations have been the primary cause of the climate crisis. Ending these emissions is essential to solving the climate crisis. Other wealthy nations are also reducing their emissions, although also too slowly.

Now I want to invite you to take an even more global perspective. We know that climate change does not respect national borders. Greenhouse gas emissions anywhere, cause climate change everywhere. This means that if we care about the livability of the planet for humans, we need to care about what’s happening with emissions everywhere.

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Using Bad News and Good News

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Reading or hearing news about the climate can pose an ongoing challenge for us. Sometimes the bad news seems overwhelming. Often it’s hard to remember the good news. I actually think that both bad news and good news can be useful to us. The bad news can help keep us focused and it affirms every decision we’ve made to put our energy into climate action. The good news reminds us that literally millions of people around the world are with us in taking on this existential crisis.

Let’s start with a bad news update and then move to some good news. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a “red alert” about global warming late last month. They noted that in 2023 humanity experienced record-breaking heat, ice melt, and greenhouse gas emissions. The average global temperature rise reached 1.45°C, nearly surpassing the 1.5° target set in Paris in 2015.
…Keep reading for details and 6 items of good news.

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Canceling the Debts of Global South Nations: A Necessary Part of the Worldwide Climate Effort – Part 2

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Actually, it is the Global North (GN) that should be repaying the Global South (GS). The countries of the GN have been stealing resources from the GS, or taking them while only paying a fraction of their cost, for centuries. The global systems of trade and finance are set up to extract profits from the Global South. Social scientists have found that the flow of resources and labor from the GS to the GN now equals $2.2 trillion per year. Furthermore, the damage to the agriculture, health, housing, infrastructure, etc. of the nations of the GS from climate change so far Is in the trillions of dollars and can be seen as part of the debt the GN owes the GS.

Debt cancellation is not rare. ,,,

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Canceling the Debts of Global South Nations: A Necessary Part of the Worldwide Climate Effort  – Part 1

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We finally have a fairly widespread understanding that we must stop burning fossil fuels to solve the climate crisis. It is just as true that we must cancel the debts of Global South nations to solve the climate crisis. There is no other way. I recognize that statement will strike some of you as radical or unreasonable. It’s taken me some time to reach this conclusion. In this post I’ll try to show how I, and others, have arrived at this position.

We know that emissions anywhere cause climate change everywhere. That means that humanity must stop emissions everywhere.

We must stop emissions in the wealthy, developed nations (the Global North) that have been the primary cause of the climate crisis. But that will not be sufficient. By 2030, 50% of all global emissions will come from the poorer nations that we collectively term the “Global South” (not including China). Eliminating emissions from the Global South is key to solving the climate crisis and will improve public health and prosperity in those nations.

Nearly 60 countries of the Global South are in debt distress or at risk of it and are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

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“The New Denialism” – What’s That?

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For many years one of the biggest obstacles to the United States taking meaningful climate action was widespread climate denial. PR campaigns, often funded by the fossil fuel industry, promoted the idea that climate change was not actually happening, and if it was, it was not caused by human activity. These campaigns were remarkably successful in creating widespread doubt about climate change. The Republican Party in the United States became the only major political party in the democratic world denying the legitimacy of climate science.

More recently, as the effects of climate change around the world and in the U.S. have become more extreme and obvious, outright denial of the existence of climate change has decreased. Polling of public beliefs in 2023 shows 72% of adults in the U.S. believe that climate change is happening. Polling shows 62% of the public in the U.S. thinks Congress should do more to address global warming.

In response, the advocates of climate denial have not gone silent, they have simply shifted their tactics to what is being termed, “New Denialism.” A recent report shows this new denialism is growing on social media and having an impact, especially on younger people.

The new tactics of the climate deniers focus in three major claims:

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A Big Win!

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On January 26, President Biden announced a halt to all new permits for LNG (Liquefied methane “Natural” Gas) export terminals. This is a very big deal because the U.S. fossil fuel industry (already the largest exporter of LNG in the world) has been proposing the biggest fossil fuel expansion in the world–17 new export terminals. These terminals would result in much more methane gas being burned in other countries, further destroying the global climate.

Stopping these terminals is an important part of solving the climate crisis. This is a victory for the frontline residents of the Gulf Coast who have been fighting them for years, for frontline people everywhere being threatened by climate change, and for all of us.

This is also a big deal because of how the decision came about. Biden’s decision was a direct result of ….

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Why Hasn’t Climate Action Made More Difference?

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There’s a lot of good news about the growth of electricity generation by solar panels and wind turbines around the world, the increase in electrifying heating and cooling of buildings, and the increased adoption of electric vehicles. Millions of people are working hard to solve the climate crisis and enable humanity to transition to a carbon-free energy systems and sustainable economies.

Yet global warming continues to increase and the predictions about the climate disasters we can expect in the future are dire. Why are the projections still so bleak when we’ve made and are making so much progress?

There is one clear answer: the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry has ….

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COP28 and the Climate Bomb on Biden’s Desk

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It’s been very interesting to read various commentators’ reactions to COP28, the UN climate conference of all the nations that met in Dubai for two weeks in December. Some are describing it as a dismal failure, while others see it as a positive turning point in human history. Paradoxically, I think both views are correct.

COP28 utterly failed to do what humanity needs in order to deal with the climate emergency. What we needed was ambitious, enforceable commitments to begin immediately to phase out fossil fuel use and extraction in every nation, and for the nations that got wealthy burning fossil fuels to provide financial assistance to the developing nations so they can deal with climate change.

Of course, we got none of this from the COP. It’s not surprising that the COP didn’t take these actions. Over 2,400 ….

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Climate Activists and Small Nations Making a Difference in Their Nations and at COP28

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I’ve been excited to learn recently about three different powerful climate activist campaigns, two of which have led to actions at COP28. As I write this it’s too early to know what the COP itself will produce, but so far much of the news seems to indicate that we have not yet built a sufficiently powerful climate movement, either in the U.S. or globally, to derail the power of the fossil fuel industry and its accomplices.

Here’s some good news. A month ago I wrote to you about a vital campaign to stop the climate-destroying expansion of LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast in the U.S. This campaign is growing. In late November activists delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the Department of Energy calling for the Biden Administration to halt any permit approvals for new LNG terminals. At the behest of Third Act, elders are writing thousands of hand-written letters. Young influencers are using TikTok and Instagram to spread the word.

The Biden Administration has made no announcements about any change in policy, but they’ve indicated privately that they are seriously studying their response to this uproar. If you haven’t signed the petition yet, please join in on what has become an international protest and sign the petition. It’s at www.bit.ly/NoNewLNG. Organizers are now seeking a million signatures. (Note: The count you will see on the signing website includes only a fraction of the signatures so far.)

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Can we handle the harsh climate truth?

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When I was in Manhattan for New York Climate Week in late September I met climate author and activist Margaret Klein Salamon for the first time. Margaret played a key role some years ago in getting activists, and then much of the press and many political leaders to use the term “climate emergency.” In 2016 she wrote an influential paper titled “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement.” That paper had a big impact on my own thinking and I’ve long admired her work, so I felt especially honored to get to meet her and talk with her.

She gave me a copy of her new book “Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth.” Reading it has been quite an experience for me. On the one hand, I find it deeply reassuring that someone else understands how serious the climate situation is and knows that we are going to have to feel a lot of feelings in order to engage fully with it. At the same time, I’m asking myself, “Am I living my life as though we are in an emergency? Or am I still trying to have a business-as-usual lifestyle that’s inappropriate to our times?”

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Stop New Methane Gas Exports Now – CP2 and 20 others

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Eight years ago in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the nations of the world set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. They agreed that every nation, and especially the wealthiest ones, would contribute to reducing climate damaging emissions.

Since then many people, businesses, climate organizations, and governments around the world have worked to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, reduce the use of fossil fuels, preserve forests, and generally reduce our collective carbon footprint. In the United States we’ve had some modest success. Since 2005 our polluting emissions have fallen 20%. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is accelerating our progress with significant incentives for transitioning to renewable energy.

However, while we’ve been making progress on domestic emissions, something horrible has been happening in the U.S. that is having a huge global impact–worsening the climate crisis with deadly effects on people all over the world. Since 2015 the U.S. has gone from exporting no oil and virtually no LNG (liquefied “natural” methane gas) to becoming the largest driller and exporter of gas and oil in the world! The increased emissions from the gas and oil we export are so great that they exceed all the reductions we’ve achieved in our domestic greenhouse gas emissions since 2005.

One effect has been to ….

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